We'll take ’em: Over 2,000 Brits pledge to house refugees

The volunteers came forward with offers of help as Chancellor George Osborne announced the cost of taking thousands more fleeing Syria would be met by the international aid budget.

So many Brits have vowed to open their doors that an online database has been launched listing those willing to give beds to those fleeing Islamic State.

Hospital consultant Dr Zoe Fritz, who set up the list, said she was “overwhelmed” by the response, which came after harrowing pictures emerged last week of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach.

The mum-of-two, 39, said: “It has been extraordinary the generosity people have had.

“From people who clearly have the space to people who have said: ‘I don’t have much but I have more than a tent on a beach somewhere’. I have been in tears.

Dr Fritz, who works at Cambridge University Hospital, said members of her family fled the massacre of Jews in Ukraine and Belarus a century ago.

She added: “If you had someone who needed shelter outside your house you would take them in, but because you can’t see them you don’t do it.

“I would be absolutely happy to do that as part of a bigger, wider organised approach”

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon

“I had hoped for 1,000 in a week so 2,000 in three days has surpassed my target.’’

We revealed on Friday how Live Aid hero Bob Geldof had offered to put up families of migrants at both his homes in London and Kent.

The Boomtown Rats frontman, 63, who was prompted to launch the 1985 fundraiser after watching a BBC news report about the famine in Ethiopia, said he had been inspired to act again by pictures of tragic little Aylan’s body washed up on the sand on the Greek island of Kos.

Last night his fellow Irish rock star Bono joined the outcry.

At a U2 concert in Turin, Italy, the singer told the crowd: “What do you want? A Europe with its heart and borders closed to mercy? Or a Europe with its heart open?”

Bono changed the lyrics to the band’s hit Pride (In the Name Of Love) to “one boy washed up on an empty beach”.